American President Barack Obama uses Belgian software. In fact the White House website runs on Drupal, a creation of the Belgian Dries Buytaert (31). According to Buytaert half a million websites worldwide run on this open source software.
Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS). That is web server software that makes it easy to build and display web pages. Many modern CMSs, including Drupal, offer a "back-end" interface with which managers can adapt the content and design of their website without any programme knowledge.
Drupal’s popularity has grown over the years. From July 2007 to June 2008 Drupal was downloaded more than 1.4 million times from the website http://drupal.org. In the meantime a large community has contributed to Drupal’s development, since the software can be downloaded for free and anyone who wants to can work on it in order to improve it.
In 2007 Drupal won the "2007 Overall Open Source CMS Award". It ended second in other categories like "Best PHP Open Source CMS" and "Best Open Source Social Networking CMS". In 2008 Drupal got the “Open Source CMS Award Winner” and “Best PHP Based Open Source CMS”. In 2009 it carried off a “Webware 100 Award” in the Social & Publishing category for the third year in a row.
Two years ago Buytaert set up Acquia, a company that maintains Drupal websites. The firm periodically checks whether the website is still safe and whether it could work faster.
